


The Moon

by thinskinnedcalciumsipper



Category: Gravity Falls, Team Fortress 2
Genre: Other, oh fuck this is really nerdy, this is not primarily engineer/pyro but i dinnae knoe how to specifye that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-16
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-08-31 08:23:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8571343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinskinnedcalciumsipper/pseuds/thinskinnedcalciumsipper
Summary: *hits that blunt* tf2/gravity falls crossover technically tho it can be easily regarded as stan/oc; stan as a young man did bad things and met a ghost.ive elected not to tag this underage because i dont want it to be but the ages and nature of the relationship depicted are ambiguous; additional content warning,; lots o of drug use





	

**Author's Note:**

> production note: i wrote this over the past 6 months over ¾ separate psychoses and reading it is like to me reading a catalogue of neuroses about disability and i hate it? burn it
> 
> bls volunteer to beta and correc my spanish *pukes*

The Moon (XVII): The moon in three phases watches over the landscape. From the pool of Cosmic Mind stuff in the foreground, a crayfish appears, symbolizing the early stages of conscious unfoldment. The wolf is nature's untamed creation; the dog is the result of adaptation to life with man. In the back-ground, halfway up the path, are the twin towers Man has erected to protect himself from his hostile environment. The Moon will lead him along the rugged path, past the towers, to the final heights of attainment, if he will be guided by her reflected light and listen to the voice of the subconscious. Once again, the falling drops are yods, representing the,descent of the Life-force from above into the material existence. This is the key of sleep and dreams. The Moon's three phases of intuition concern body, mind and spirit. The Moon Mother watches over the birth of Spirit into material manifestation.

*

[the stars are starry and bright](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5WO0kATepM)  
the birds are sleeping at night  
and there is no one in sight  
under the moon  
  
Close to my heart I feel your tender embrace  
Never to part like birds in June  
  
I’m calling you, you know I’m waiting for you,  
we’ve got some loving to do under the moon 

*

Under a sleet moon the Hansel-trail of pulpy black blood wrote directions up the weather-washed pier – he hastened in, in a fever, in flight, still very drunk, up the derelict concrete avenue until he tottered in the mouth of some decaying wareroom he recalled once delivering heroin to – he choked, he tasted the repellent zinc and stink of his blood, it spilled from his lips to his lapel – he ran, still, through a lofty glossy gossamer color he’d only encountered once before (Panama, racketeering scheme, flyaway rifle fire splashed his knee) only experiencing the soaring walls by colliding with them, the scattered pools of sea water and nondescript slime he slipped in, the ecclesiastical vast dark, trash and shit – with animal tenacity he ran until he collapsed in a pit of dark above the soaked bars and shush of the sea, (something vividly, tenderly remembered in his thinning diurnal blood, long ago, as half of a whole) and the water-rotted remains of mattress he literally stumbled upon; he dreamed briefly something spun from whispers, a prehistoric pattern, pale geometry – he knew he was dying, but he didn’t die.

An insensate span of hours passed over him. Unseen, the day dawned, a pallid waif which waltzed to an argent noon in constant quiet, and in the dim solitude haunting the eviscerated block hung like an ornament over the decaying pier, against all odds, in time, Stan became awake.

He promptly vomited a cup of custard-yellow bile and narrowly missed collapsing in it. He felt more hungover than he’d ever been. His side felt scooped out. Stan was not squeamish, but feeling the tacky fabric that ensconced it (bandaged) he felt for an instant his ghost flicker and fade before pitching up hysterically with the meter of his head.

Miserably, he moaned. It resounded back at him from the voluminous ceiling and beneath it, belying it, he heard (he hurt terribly) something else, something soft and small – he realized then (bandaged!) he was not alone.

He was so sick. He slept a brief, weak sleep, he looked a while at the stones and silence, he heaved and rocked and rolled over (he realized with a start that almost displaced the racket in his head there was a loveworn teddy bear in bed beside him) and he saw then (wobbling columns of sunshine, greenish with sea, plumes of plankton shifting) in the tenebrous tides something was seeing him.

He was too ill still to be alarmed, but bet he saw the something – he held tight his side – he saw, squinting into stripes of cold sweat, a girl – he guessed – a spectral femaleish something somewhere beneath the mausoleum dark which blended into a thick profusion of black hair (black as coal, black as smoke, black as ash,) – hungry long brown limbs loose in an alarming way, plum and apricot contusions, patches of cracked black blood – ruined frock unweaving at its end – he guessed she was a ghost.

“Umm,” he thought he heard her say.

He stared – too intensely, too much, the world scattered and soared up all around, and when he came down to skin with a woeful moan, the darkly something (frank fawn tawny pearlescent naked very small hands together gripping her daintily lifted skirt) stood closer to him, much closer – she stood at the boundary of the decayed bed he lay in – he saw a shimmering suggestion of eyes within the wilderness of hair, vast and black and bright.

She was silent. He smelled her, the powerful unpleasant acridity of unwashed girl. He wouldn’t consent to be afraid. He felt an impulse to raise his voice (weird girl, wandering barefoot, adjacent to naked and fucking filthy, where were her parents?) but the maiden of his mother which ruled in him shut tight the seabeast teeth of his deplored father and Stan instead slowly, slowly inched up on his elbows, and only very gently said:

“I,” he sought some comment, anything like normalcy, “am I in your bed?”

The revenant was silent.

“Sorry,” Stan said, “but I’m sick – you understand me? – I’m sick, so let me stay a while, okay?”

Shyly, she hummed at him.

“You understand? Comprende?”

“Soy no comprendido,” whispered she, and Stan offered a thin but tenacious smile to her. She did not smile in reply – not exactly, but the starved grave strokes of her bones perceptibly softened, her eyes flashing beneath her hair passed over him more temperately. Her voice astonished Stan. It was at once higher, brighter, harder, darker than he could have anticipated – she looked like a child but spoke like a crone. It was highly humanizing.

“?Hablas Espanol?”

She said nothing.

“Vos si,” Stan began, corrected himself, “ah… verdad –”

She said nothing, but creeping shyly up beside him, lay her little hand (the other shivering where it twisted up the funerary gauze of her dirty skirt) near the full rose of his blood imprinted in bed, in him.

“Thank you,” Stan said, feeling a shift in him of genuine softness for the waif – he’d always nursed a bleeding heart to kids – “gracias –” and seeing how she shook, he offered again, “puedo… puedo que…”

She said something Stan couldn’t understand – rapid and soft, chin in her chest, something something bien something, and Stans Spanish was approximate at best (only enough to offer drugs and negotiate for his life) – so he only revealed his teeth in sheepish submission, and she saw this, and actually giggled.

“Sleep,” she said, touching reassuringly his fractured side, very gently, very gently, the touch of someone acquainted with the ephemerality of flesh – Stan knew then implicitly it was she that stopped his blood and saved his life – “sleep,” she said in tilted English, in her voice of black pearl on gold chain – she cast a spell on him, she said “sleep” and Stan solving and absolving and dissolving his sickness of excess in his dammed abdomen lay back in the thickened blood and mineral mildew which felt like swansdown and silk to a man starved for the exorbitant luxury of kindness and Stan slept.

*

Stan was vaguely aware the dark girl brought water to his lips somewhere in the blurry myrtle night that followed – his algesic-drunk bones tried to turn in distress and certain hands caught and corrected him – he imagined at the threshhold of the world he’d heard her singing but her voice was exactly like his brothers, when they were small, playing together in the light and mist of the elysium seaside, “over the garden wall I let the baby fall –” he woke feeling lonely but very improved, and he turned his head and saw her – that strange girl – folded up on the floor in a pool of shivering sealight and pale shade, her dress arranged around her knees he saw boasted all ready a ghost of umber down, her brief babyish fingers knotted in her curls, a bear on her hip, her shy eyes flashing once at him, mere acknowledgement or meager beacon.

“Soy Stan,” said Stan. She looked almost warmly at him – she’d displaced a tendril of hair which revealed one unblinking eye Stanley was surprised to see was pretty, round with long intensely black eyelashes – but she did not respond.

“What’s your name?”

“Yo no se,” she hushed.

“?Tu mama?”

A single negating shake of the head, unemotional. That cut, at least, Stan saw, was clean. He could of guessed.

“Mine too,” Stan said, not knowing how much she understood but seeing her acclimate to every word, the briar of her curls becoming blossomed, “not – gone, but she isn’t here. I won’t see her again.”

“Hmm,” she said.

He went out (she tiptoed after him a bit, his larval stalker through phantasmagoria, timidly she touched the hem of his shirt like she expected to see him never again and disintegrated into the dark like a bouncing raindrop) and he returned, to her perceptible astonishment, to put into her cupped puppy claws collections of cellophane slips of colorful candies, a bottle of pink lemon soda pop with a Coney Island teal top – she looked at him with eyes wide open, with such unconcealed dumbstruck glee he couldn’t help but to tickle her – a hot dog in wax paper he insisted with exaggerated gestures she eat before anything else, and she did as he asked, and Stan was astonished himself by the vivid sensation of tender attachment putting down root in him – she sat at his side on the bed which bore bold black emblems of his death, diligently nibbling, and he watched her and he smiled and smiled and smiled. He wiped her mouth with his sleeve and she let him.

She was bigger than Stan’d imagined, not very much shorter than him! a big strong-looking girl, though her knees and feet were pitifully thin, and shy, Stan learned – shyer even than he’d seen – only echoes of any passing vehicle, any noise but white seasound, any intimation of activity at all filtering through the honeycombed halls caused her to leap away and tuck into the ruin in terror – he could coax her out with kindly crooning and candy (she liked pink ones) and it became easier every time – (“?Que es esto?,” he asked of her plump stuffed bear and she replied mildly, “el oso,” looking at him like he was a fool) – her hair in her face annoyed him, so he pushed it away, and she permitted this, and he managed to not stare at the astonishing secret of her face – she put out her paw for a toffee peanut and he teased her, tossing them between his own teeth until she was incited to stamp her feet and scale him to retrieve her prize – he clapped her shoulder in congratulation and she showed him her menacing long jumbled teeth and drew the veil of her black hair back down around her.

Stan didn’t stay. When the light descending the long walls bloomed warm and short, Stan gently extricated himself from their game (she had cracked black wax pastels with which she was inscribing in the coarse floor clouds, flowers, strange planets for his perusal) and when she fell forward onto him as though to ask him stay, he only caught her unhappy grasping hand, patted her head and disappeared from her.

Eight days later, in the first movement of the dawn of the fourth of July (ruddy humming drum, triangle starspray, one voluptuous lily of opening oboe) Stan parked at the maw of busted rusted warehouse gate and anxiously sucked a blunt until he was convinced to go in to her – she revealed herself like a fairy, witchs unraveling skirt and wire crown, shining at him – she held her bear, a box of crayon ends, a wad of waterlogged dresses, and Stan held her – he carried her over the threshold and inserted her into his car and she impulsively tugged his ear and kissed his chin, he smiled at her for a while, quietly, they smiled – and they left.

*

She was good, a good companion and a good girl, who did as he asked when she could see the sense of it, but Stan couldn’t evade the fact the poor thing wasn’t well, in a psychological sort of way. A lot like a cat he’d had as a child (Meatball, whose squeaking tabby kittens he’d watched his father feed to the river) she’d jump at nothing at all – fixed with chattering terrors on vapors, freaks of light, awful things only she could see – her speech, though she seldom spoke, he thought he detected, tended to trip and limp and loop in an atypical way, sometimes failing her entirely for a long time. Sometimes she’d go very still for a long time. She stayed awake long into the night every night, hiding under the clattering cupboards and poker tables provided with their catchpenny dens, snatching erratically whatever was offered her – her meals, his tenderly soft hand she chewed, distractions of coloring books and crayons (she obliterated red ones, ate blue) and penny novelties, marbles and model guns and a paddle ball he’d retained from a distant childhood – sometimes for a long time she absolutely would not be touched, and if he tried – if he was compelled, say, to pick her up from bed under profoundly motivating time constraints and a terrifying frantic rodentine rapping on the flimsy room door – he’d come away with a busted eye but an indulgent grin, in time on a green hill beneath a palm tree when she was calm and chewed her coconut candy and crawled into the curve of his arm at last to rest. She cooked okay, only she was too liberal using hot peppers and tended to scorch.

She was happy sometimes and when she was damnably energetic – she protested heartily the task of sitting still beside him the long hours between states or being locked up in the various pink, teal, red neon rooms Stan spirited them to in his tireless enterprising – she was insistent in examining the bags, sacks, suitcases Stan was sometimes compelled to keep briefly in their room, though he’d pinch her brusquely whenever her nose came too close to something it shouldn’t.

Stan showed her his gun. He brought her when she could be coaxed out (cleaving to his side, cowering beneath his coat) to look at white brown black big and small birds in the frondsy lake park in verdant Virginia and toss Hostess cupcake crumbs, to spaghetti dinner with red checked tablecloth in a stinking Lousiana slum (she liked the look of plum rum red wine and Stan I’m sorry to report conceded to her a sip which made her cry in displeasure,) to a tall new sparkling silver crystal department store on a teal Tennessee street corner which lit stars in her big black eyes – he bought her there with a fiber of the cocaine kings fortune a doll with black hair and a new dress with a girlish collar and abundant skirt she loved so well she wouldn’t remove it for many weeks. She wouldn’t bathe and Stan was simply not up to the task of compelling her. He bought her a phial of cinnamony perfume and brushed her teeth for her while she dozed tummy-up in his lap at the particle board on a crate upon which he painted bills. She didn’t like beer but she loved to smoke with him (only cigarettes, he insisted) and begged and begged and begged, in Spanish, English and Girlish to light, which Stan learned very quickly to never never never permit her to do.

Stan supposed she didn’t like men, generally – they terrified her, as she terrified them, ranting in disjointed theremin chirps and groans, her black hair flying, her muscular arms, her claws, her long teeth, which bit off the thumb once of a car parts corporal in Arizona in an adobe room who had gestured abruptly at Stan with his gun. How she hated to be seen! He didn’t deny the little thrill which gripped him when she’d fly into his arms whenever any one beheld her (her face in her hands, her wild hair, Stan realized late one night walking up a blue cedar lined avenue drunkenly interrogating the mask of the half moon he utterly loved her.)

She wanted to sleep with him – liked the heat of his body he guessed – and sometimes, usually when he’d been doing drugs, he’d let her – and she liked to sit in his lap, a lot, sometimes she hugged him, sometimes she kissed him, his chin, his hand when he gave her a toffee peanut – and in the night, her fat, soft, strong, brown, spotted, honey-rosy and glowing fragrant limbs and breasts were aligned with him – he’d seen her naked before, sort of – he tried not to look but he had to help her toilet sometimes, and ripped her dress resuscitating her once when she ate a rock of brown sugar opiate, and a time she tried to undress herself at a cocktail party at a race track – he thought she might have little breasts above her long childishly rotund freckled brown belly – her arms and legs were downy with pretty bloodbright hairs, and her – Stan recited historical baseball scores for a while, the Cubs, the Red Socks, the blurry red knuckle of her little cupped hand was very warm resting on his shoulder, which he realized in a daze of dread was exposed by his undershirt – she was sick, she was very sick, she needed his care, she needed him – she made a little cry in her sleep, her strange, deep, hardy, sorrowful, childlike, hoarse, crowing voice, “conmigo,” he heard her say, “with?” she slipped her forefinger into her lips, clucked comfortably, cuddled closer to the crook of his thick neck in the thicket her fragrant curly black hair made. Her chin and lips and the tip of her nose, Stan thought, were very red, chubby, glossy, pretty. She had freckles and beauty spots. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were so vast and black they might have been marks merely delineating a mask.

They were staying in a turquoise room (electricity, no water) white roof, sequence of cabins with dim windows, electric tangerine, Pepto Bismol pink, the purplish bloom of prickly pears by the door where a tender zephyr dwelled, the tide of buttercup yellow sand staggered to the stair at the door, the enormous moon over an idea of stumbling violet mesa where something mournfully rowed, a shiny brown scorpion crawling in over the shrilly lit stucco wall – Stan had just had another line and blinked hard, pinching his nose, as he looked in mute amazement at the cervine gentility and grace and tentative, tender gestures of the helpless tiny toffee fairy which wandered in a heaven of oblivion through hazards she couldn’t imagine – Stan thought it was pretty and Stan helped it out the door on the fifty dollar bill with which he’d inhaled his pale dream.

He discovered she was too old to be eagerly accepted at an orphanage. She recognized church. She understood church. She seemed to enjoy it. He let her sit a long time before the vision of the virgin Mary, dressed in billowing red trimmed in gold, weeping crystals in ecstasy, her red lips, her writhing hands, illuminated in the blue green dark by many burning candles. She put her hand in his as they returned to his car in the trumpet flower infested alley beyond the pawn shop where they lived until Stan could afford a new id.

He sat up in the driver seat and drank of a cup of cold congealed coffee. She cuddled under her quilt in the bed of the back seat, contentedly reciting something melodic and alien under her breath. In the hazy delphic milk of cosmos reflected in his rearview mirror he saw her little scarlet-violet-brown-pink-pale-paw dart out, hover, flutter, select from the racket of crayons spilled on the crumby carpet the dulled thumb of red and evaporate.

In the end, she left him.

He didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t know he’d never see her again. She often became angry for reasons Stan didn’t understand. He hadn’t let her hold his lighter, smoke pot with him or kiss his lips. She’d become very quiet, which she sometimes did. He’d patted her and she had let him. She sat on the red striped woven rug on the red clay floor and looked at her long fingers woven through her toes for a long time, the blue shadow of an erect palm frond filtering moonlight like his fist grasping her.

“Mi amor,” Stan said to her, but she didn’t respond. In time she stood up and merely gently left.

*

Five years later, the sixties were buried with daisies in their eyes and Stan was a man, tall and broad, reflecting with regret on transgressions of his youth, on television, morbidly poor though he was successful in seeming not to be – he fled familiar blond and green-eyed Arizona into the wide wild asylum of the arid red roof of Texas – living from his car parked in a motel lot, walking to a hick wooded outpost outside Bee Cave to shift funds for gasoline and beer he entered in full raiment the stage of the department store where he saw her.

Her hair was combed. It was combed and cleaned and braided and pinned in a glossy black crest to the top of her head woven with ribbons and chaste daisies – her face (Stan stared) boldly shown. She looked so clean. She had breasts. She was beautiful. She was selecting a shade of pink for curtains, phrased by a milk pink particle pillar, a beam of ruddy daylight, an orbiting aperture of shining blue sea-glass, her hands, her red and brown and pink hands, the light on her beautiful clean combed braided hair, her adored head a little bowed, a black ringlet falling over her eyes, her large articulate hand plucking it away. She wore a new clean white dress, the hem embroidered with a happy cavalcade of red and yellow flowers, a little tight around the middle which was (holy Moses) visibly distended.

Turning, he saw her in his periphery like he had once seen her freckled breasts stiffen, point at him, posed in surprise.

“Stan?” he heard her say – it was her, as long as he lived, he could never forget that sound, her strange, sad, small voice emitting timidly his name – he saw her as he turned her back begin to put his hand out to him (a fond embrace inflicted on her by a white man, a broad, short, shaven father of her child) so he ran.

He’d never inflict himself on her.

*

[sky is blue](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb9qQM50ekY)  
night is cold  
moon is new  
but love is old  
and while I'm waiting here this heart of mine is singing,  
'lover, come back to me.' 


End file.
